Synonyms

Definition

A geo-social network (GeoSN) is an online social network augmented by geographical information. Using a GeoSN application, usually through mobile devices, users can check in at places, find friends in the vicinity, etc. A GeoSN can be either a traditional online social network (e.g., Facebook (http://www.facebook.com), Twitter (http://www.twitter.com), and Google+ (https://plus.google.com)) that has been enhanced with check-in functionality or a pure GeoSN (e.g., Foursquare (http://www.foursquare.com)) focused on location-based services.

A GeoSN can be modeled as a social graph G = (V, E) where (i) a node v ∈ V represents a user, (ii) each edge (u, v) ∈ E indicates the friendship between two users v and u ∈ V, and (iii) each node is associated with a list of coordinates of the locations visited by the corresponding user. Similar to online social networks, the social graph can be either directed or undirected, while the edges can be...